He comes from a dynasty of high achievers yet Stephen Freud – brother of
Lucian and Sir Clement – spent 40 years selling ironmongery. Here he breaks
his lifelong silence to tell Adam Lusher about living in the Freud shadow
and the family feud he longs to resolve

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Stephen Freud who has died aged 93Photo: OLI SCARFF

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When people ask if Stephen is related to Sir
Clement [left] and Lucian [right], he says: 'No, they are related to me. After all, I am the eldest'Photo: GETTY

By Adam Lusher

6:46PM BST 12 Jul 2008

There was no name on the door. Just a simple sign that read, rather obliquely, "Successors to Charles Harden". For sale were drawer pulls, switch plates and every kind of doorknob imaginable, from the most basic to the most ornate, in dusty boxes that matched the shop's air of eccentricity.

It was as if Stephen Freud, the owner of the little hardware shop just off Baker Street, craved not so much anonymity as invisibility.

The brother of artist Lucian and MP-turned-broadcaster Sir Clement, and grandson of Sigmund, Stephen has remained so determinedly unnoticed that Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, was still asserting last week that "Ernst Freud had two children, the broadcaster Clement Freud and the painter Lucian".

This is unusual behaviour for a Freud – a dynasty that dominates the London social scene. Its gilded younger generation includes Sir Clement's daughter Emma, a broadcaster and the wife of Richard Curtis, screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Matthew, Sir Clement's son, who runs one of Britain's top PR companies and is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert. Meanwhile, Lucian's daughter Esther is a renowned novelist and her sister, Bella, a leading fashion designer.

But now, at the grand old age of 86, Stephen has given his first interview.

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Interest was generated when The Sunday Telegraph recently revealed the lingering acrimony between Lucian and his two brothers. The artist claimed he had rejected a knighthood because Sir Clement had already received the honour. And about Stephen, he said: "Not seeing or speaking to him doesn't worry me in the least."

Lucian has been quoted as claiming that the rift began 10 years ago, after allegations by Stephen forced him to respond with legal action. But Stephen is reticent as to why the two fell out. "It's quite impossible to say. He had his reasons, no doubt."

We meet in the living room of his large detached house in Chiswick, west London, where he has lived for more than half a century. In the hallway, his passions are revealed in a golfing print and a painting of sprinting greyhounds.

His wife, 81-year-old Ann, sits by him on the sofa, acting as "interpreter" in case his failing hearing doesn't pick up a question. The couple are surrounded by their four cats – Topsy, Minnie, Beulah and Mince Pie – purring from every available surface.

"If he were to say, 'I would like to be on good terms again', I would say 'Why not?'," Stephen continues. But Lucian, he insists, should make the first move: "Because he fell out with me. I didn't fall out with him."

In a corner of his bookcase is a framed photograph of The Painter's Brother, the portrait of Mr Freud completed by Lucian in 1986. "He made me look five years older, but it was flattering that he painted me. It was interesting, because when Lucian paints, he talks. And he is a very interesting person.

"We used to be on very good terms for a very long time," he adds matter-of-factly. "It's a shame not to be in touch. But whether he feels the same way, I don't know."

At least 'Clay', as he calls Sir Clement, still visits. And as Stephen speaks, it is hard not to recall the verbal style of the BBC broadcaster. Fetching a fading photograph of three boys in short trousers, arranged in order of height, he points out the little boy who was to become Sir Clement, now 84 and a panellist on the Radio 4 show Just a Minute, who was knighted in 1987, and Lucian, 85, the painter whose work recently set a world record for the highest price paid for a living artist.

Pointing out himself, Stephen admits happily as something of a contrast: "Golf has played really quite a large part in my life."

Sigmund Freud's book Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis states that "the position of a child in the family order is of extreme importance", and psychoanalysts have made much of the elder brother's role as guardian of the family.

Yet while Stephen has achieved far less public status than Sir Clement and Lucian, he still insists on his eldest brother role.

"People would say: 'Are you related to Clement and Lucian?' And I said: 'No, they are related to me.' After all, I was the eldest brother."

But he is reluctant to be drawn on their early life together. "To describe what it was like living with one's brothers, one has to have lived with more than one lot. We got on passably well."

He never sought their fame, he insists. "I am pleased for them, but I didn't want to share their limelight. One doesn't. It's a question of not stepping into somebody else's shoes."

He confirms, too, that Lucian was very close to their mother Lucie, yet he has no childhood recollection of what Sir Clement describes in his autobiography: "When she came into the nursery," he wrote, "she nodded to Stephen and me and sat down with Lucian and whispered. They had secrets."

Of his own relationship with their mother, he ventures no Freudian insights: "I'm sure my relationship was fairly normal."

"He doesn't express his feelings," his wife says, kindly.

The grandson of Sigmund Freud? Not a therapy person?

"No," confirms Mrs Freud. "Far from it."

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mr Freud's family left Berlin for north London. Sigmund followed in 1938, living in Hampstead before his death in 1939.

"He was remarkably humble for one of the scientists of the century," Stephen recalls. "Father played cards with him. I catalogued his library. Not at all well."

Still, he never dreamed of following his grandfather into psychiatry. "An act I couldn't follow is probably somewhere near the mark."

He studied history, but gave up his Cambridge degree after war was declared. A naturalised British citizen, he served in Italy manning self-propelled guns, and prefers recounting only anecdotes highlighting his supposed military failings.

"In Italy we had to do early-morning gunnery practice with blank shells," he recalls. "Owing to a misunderstanding for which I was obviously responsible, one of the guns fired a live shell. One fellow officer insisted that my shell had destroyed a German secret weapon and made a difference to the war, but that was entirely his imagination."

He is similarly British about his post-war career. "I was a publisher's editor. Why did I leave? I think I got the sack. I wasn't terribly good."

So he found a shop run by one Charles Harden, who was keen to sell. Hence the name, Successors To Charles Harden. Mr Freud ran the shop for 40 years and retired five years ago.

"I had to do something," he smiles, "and this was a business needing no great expertise." Mrs Freud grins: "He keeps his records of racing losses and winnings much better than he did the shop ledger."

He keeps other records, too. Squeezing between piles of old Racing Posts, Mr Freud fetches evidence of his closest brushes with fame: carbon copies of his letters to the sporting press. He reads out his favourites, some 20 years old. His other great passion is golf. In fact, Stephen met Ann, a bank manager's daughter, at Southwold Golf Club in Suffolk.

"I proposed by means of a mixed foursomes," he says proudly. "I told Ann I had entered us in the Evergreens at Worplesdon in Surrey, for gentlemen and ladies over 50. She was annoyed as she didn't want people knowing her age. I said, 'Well, there is a slight consolation. I have entered us as Mr and Mrs Freud.'" They married in 1977.

Mr Freud also talks about his first wife, Lois, whom he married in 1950. He didn't womanise, he explains – unlike Lucian, who has a reputation as a ladykiller, and has fathered many children. He admits that he did, though, share the love of betting that marked Lucian's younger years.

"When my daughter, Dorothy, was born, I did go and see them in hospital – but not for long. Thady the Thief was running at Wimbledon Dogs. I still remember: it was backed from 12-1 to 2-1? and it came last. Lois must have quite rightly taken a dim view." They divorced amicably after seven years.

He talks proudly of Dorothy, of her Cambridge double first and of her teaching children with learning difficulties.

Sitting in his armchair, the brother of the painter and the broadcaster seems lost in his anecdotes and content. But it's difficult not to wonder whether living in his family's shadow has been painful.

"I'm happy with my own achievements," he says quietly. "I have lived an interesting life. I have done the things I wanted to do."